We’re almost there, darling.
Nino did not reply, because the Madonna’s smile came into view before the rest of her, and it unnerved him as much as ever. For years he had tactfully avoided reminding her of his existence, but now she herself had dragged him back! What was wrong with this world? He tried to say to himself: She’s nothing but a vampire! — never mind that he was the one who had come to drink blood.
He had forgotten her sadly smiling slightly bewildered face, and that infuriating way that her eyes had of looking lost. The Christ child in her arms was a sexless little adult.
Francesca was now praying steadily. He knelt beside her, moved his lips, and closed his eyes, so as not to be haunted by Our Lady’s face. Dove, lily and olive branch, those Marian attributes he promised henceforth to adore. When he could no longer put it off, he stood up and kissed that stone forehead, tasting dust, salt, soot, then blood.
Instantly her bleeding ceased, leaving for a souvenir a reddish-ocher stain on her smooth cold forehead. Simultaneously Nino found himself healed, so that his life became as lovely as the long dead singer Bianca Kaschman, as useless as an artificial sand dollar, as meaninglessly triumphant as wreaths of silver and gold. Again, one must wonder about Our Lady’s motives.
Within the year he turned away from his wife, since he now lacked any further need of others. Self-entitled to the seductive stare of a certain Triestina in a pallid formal gown with half a dozen hems, her right knee crossed over the left to make a platform for her left elbow as she played with the pearls on her triple-stranded necklace, her hair pulled back, everything dim and silver-blue but for the whites of her eyes, he pursued and eventually won her on a blue-grey day of bora rain, streetlamp reflections shining on the empty street like cat-eyes, until he finally unlatched the coffers of his heart for her and she saw inside. Francesca, for whom he had so long pretended to be tamed, kept looking desperately between her tanned and slender knees, in case she she had lost some part of herself. — Fortunately, she was comforted, for the long-necked, golden-haloed, blue-grey bird called the Holy Ghost flew to her from out of an old Croatian-Glagolitic missal. Then she took the children, and ran off with a haberdasher.
As for him, ambition bemused him, like a lady’s legs reflected in a curving wall of brass — but without Francesca his belly-rash returned. The next time Nino kissed the Madonna’s stained forehead, his affliction, as indeed he had expected, refused to divorce him. This was positively insulting, since Our Lady could easily have made another cure; everyone knows she vanquished a cholera epidemic in 1849. Lonely and perhaps not far away from death (so it certainly appeared when he looked into the mirror), Nino would have wooed her had he known how, but found it easier to become a politician — for his life, unlike yours or mine, was comically accidental and meaningless. Incited by slogans about smashing the idols, chipping away at restraint, tearing down the old order, he believed that life should have promised him something, and he was not the only one.
In his schooldays the bad boy had loved Emperor Massimiliano, touched his statue and even refrained from daubing, scratching or chipping it. So it might be “no accident” that he betook himself to the deep and ancient chairs of the Caffè San Marco, worn by generations of nationalists’ buttocks.
An eagle on a shroud for Lohengrin, said the Duke, and we’ll need turquoise-beaded bands on its wings and sad ruby eyes, because…
Silence! The leader arrives—
The leader liked Nino, because he was so good at telling lies, so before the Madonna had wept or bled again he got to take the train all the way to Venice, bearing in his briefcase the money and confidence of the party. Already he was hoping that someday he could for all purposes become a white statue whose arms would be pompously folded across his toga’d breast, overwatching the red flag which bore the historical weight of Trieste’s white fleur-de-lys well enough to slowly, slowly stir, unfurling like a pill dissolving in liquid, then wrapping itself up again, just as Caesar covered his face when he saw Brutus among his assassins… and below the flag’s balcony, all of us, his followers, even Our Lady (whose statue was naturally much smaller) would be carried into the shadow where arched windows shone silver and cigarette smoke diffused like sea-fog. Thus his hopes, and the train had barely passed Miramar. — Here came the trolley of coffees, candies and cigarettes. The woman who wheeled it wore a frothy white chemise, and there were dark circles under her armpits. As she drew close to his seat, he inhaled the smell of her sweat and was enchanted. Those intimate circles, they reminded him of the light seen through grape leaves. Because he knew what to say, she soon agreed to meet him in a hotel room where the shadow of the lace curtain on the Naples yellow wall resembled a harp, but when he undressed, it turned out that his sickness had spread. Revolted, the woman departed.
What will become of me? he anguished, which is not the same as what will I become? — If only Our Lady had left me as I was that first time — if Francesca hadn’t dragged me there…! — for what he detested above all was confusion. He wished to be what he was, coldly and secretly. But what was that?
Resigning from politics without even returning the money, and therefore knowing that unless her new husband, who had friends in three of Trieste’s marine insurance companies, saved him, his best hope was death, he returned on his knees to Francesca, who unfortunately had grown happy where she was. Out of pity (and with her new husband’s permission) she gave him a lily and an olive branch, instructing him to sleep with them under his pillow until he dreamed of the Madonna. But he never did. One cool whitish-pale morning when a single pale pigeon flew high across the Via Dante Alighieri, showing itself for the merest instant between the two embellished streetwalls, Nino returned to kiss Our Lady’s forehead once more in secret, desperate to believe that it would bleed again, although he knew quite well not only that all hope of that had fled, but also that whatever solution the mystery of the bleeding stone image might contain, he was better off never learning. Our Lady bowed her marble face, silently suffering the touch of his lips; and the bloodstain on her forehead matched in hue the crimson-brown garment of one of those faded figures on certain Istrian graveyard frescoes. He licked and licked at her forehead like a dog, but this time he could not obtain the slightest blood-taste. By the time death came, from complications of his rash, exacerbated by three bullets in the back, Nino had become bitter — although, come to think of it, he might always have been that way.
CAT GODDESS
Dark bronze Rossetti, haughty on his plinth, held a book and clutched his heart, while among the many abject figures below, a seminude crowned lady who held a tablet of the laws essayed eternally to offer him a palm branch. As soon as the evening darkened sufficiently to be safe, he stepped down, snubbing the poor crowned lady, who grew as disappointed as if she were made of flesh, an emotion she could not sweat out or weep out, because the foundry had cast her to love only him above her, whom he unfortunately considered a mere decoration; Rossetti-adoration was in her every bronze atom. Rossetti, differently comprised, wanted women. The clashing of bronze against bronze could not seduce him. Some of our miseries may be called tragedies of place, as was the syndrome of that poor crowned lady (whose name was Giovanna); had fate simply established her farther down the coast, she might have attracted the attentions of some marble Herakles. Cloaking his face, Rossetti set off to drink a grappa in the brown and creamy-yellow silence of the Caffè San Marco, where they kept a table for him by the far wall, in a niche whose sweet dimness offered however treacherously to preserve the semiliving from recognition. He paid in bronze, of course: heavy, dark, ovoid coins from a hoard within the plinth, which was much hollower than it appeared. Our Lady of the Flowers, who performs miracles every day, replenished his treasury, out of loving pity, which indeed shored up his equanimity. Why he could not be satisfied with standing forever overlooking the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” graciously accepting the deposits of pigeons, cannot be explained; but several other plinths in Trieste had been vacated by now, their heroes and heroines having chosen ecstatic oblivion over unbending fame. There was, for instance, a certain shy little marble girl whose sculptor, Barcalgalia, had condemned her always to be half-trying to cover her pubis; meanwhile she had conveniently pulled up her marble shift, so over time she gave and took much joy. A century and more it had been since she first leaped off her marble block. Our Lady, whose hobbies include the arranging of marriages, once proposed her to Rossetti’s consideration, but he said: You know, cara, the thing is, I have a bitter disposition. That’s why I need someone soft and yielding. I’m not saying a stone woman can’t be forgiving; for instance, look at you, still smiling, with that bloodstained forehead! But you’re not, how should I say, available… — nor would he have wished her to be; although he had several times been tempted by the exaggerated frozen gazes of the thespians at the Circulo Artistico, he longed, if such a verb is not preposterous when applied to him, for a dear woman of flesh who could warm him up as even Triestine sunlight never could, not quite; indeed, it was considerably worse for poor bronze Giovanna, who had to stand always in his shadow — not that she ever complained. And so the shy marble girl found herself another taker; one day James Joyce stepped off his plinth by the Canal Grande, and the newspapers wrote that he had been stolen by a nymphomaniacal American heiress who engaged in untrammelled sexual congress with statues. After Joyce deserted his post, even Umberto Sava, it was said, began to be tempted by a certain someone cast in pure silver. As for Rossetti, all he needed were his nightly amours. For her part, Giovanna (whose longings resembled brass railings shining in the morning sun) never imagined lowering herself to engage in such practices. Where her idol went when he departed her she suspected all too well, but since he never failed to return, she had at least someone to look up to. So on the evening under consideration, she watched his departure no less calmly than mournfully. Rossetti turned his steps to the San Marco, which, while it was not as quiet as early on a Sunday afternoon just before closing, remained a good venue for a bronze fellow who prefers to be left in peace. Whenever he had the place to himself, Rossetti liked to inspect each of the round brass-bordered portraits, whose crudeness surpassed that of worn Etruscan frescoes. To the vertically grooved column-reliefs upon the Naples yellow walls clung plaques whose import might be stylized honeybees or petals of quartered flowers; these decorative concretions soothed Rossetti by reminding him of his plinth. So he sat down in his private corner, prepared to re-explore the way that some grappas burn and others glow. And on this night the slender, elderly waiter, whose spectacles never ceased shining even when he straightened his necktie, revealed, without even any expectation of a tip, that a sweet girl all alone in a tasselled scarf and a long pale dress dress of many embroideries had just decided to paint her lips, cock her plumed hat, and set off for the radiant sea. Can you believe it? She meant to abandon this world! Moreover, she derived not from some Serbo-Croatian-speaking karstic village high in the interior, which origin might have excused her, but from Trieste herself, empress of cities. The waiter, who took pride in knowing Rossetti’s tastes, remarked that this young lady, whose name was Silvia, was worth looking over, at which Rossetti pondered and ordered another grappa. Next morning, when Silvia arrived at the port, whose ships’ smokestacks resembled banded cigars, Rossetti, having without making her a single promise instructed Giovanna to take his place on the plinth, either with or without her palm branch, whatever she considered most discreetly effective, stood waiting to rescue the girl from the sea.